State-of-the-art stereo or 3D video coding scheme like MVC (Multiple-View Video Coding), encode stereo views (Left and Right) into a stream and deliver to a terminal for viewing or other purposes. The terminal side will decode the stream and render to a display in the right order of the Left and Right for 3D viewing, or decode the stream for further editing before the content consumption.
It is found that a healthy 3D viewing experience is always affected by such factors like mis-alignment between each views, viewing distance, display size, and minimum and maximum disparity values corresponding to the viewing distance and display size, etc.
There is always complaint about 3D health issues due to un-known 3D content quality, which is only one issue, but also un-known 3D content characteristics, for example too large of a 3D budget beyond what our human eye can endure based on the fixed viewing distance and display size, etc. 3D budget can be obtained from the difference between maximum disparity and minimum disparity values. Complaint could also come from too much pop-up for our eye to endure based on the fixed viewing distance and display size, etc. Too much pop-up is the result of too large of a value of the maximum disparity.
3D budget or maximum or minimum disparity can be calculated from 3D content but the accuracy of the values is not either easily guaranteed or it is involved in intensive computation. So it is expected such values could be generated at the content creation side, for example during 3D movie making stage. However based on the state-of-the art, such values are not well prepared during 3D production, or 3D content packaging and delivery, or not well utilized for content consumption, for example, with these values to guide the terminal to render the 3D content to match with the viewing condition.
For example, 3D Movie production is to make 3D content with the specific characteristics to match with the viewing condition of the movie theaters, while when such content is displayed on home 3DTV or portable device, it would be mis-matched which will cause unhealthy 3D viewing. For personal 3D, it is even worse, as there is no rule and no mechanism to guide consumers to capture a healthy 3D which can fit to their viewing condition on home 3DTV or Portable 3D device. As a result, so-called bad 3D viewing experience will happen (like eye strain and headache issue, etc.).
In the state-of-the art camera parameters like baseline and convergent angle between the two cameras are often available and also possible to be carried with the 3D content to help informing the terminal about the 3D content's characteristics, however it alone cannot tell 3D budget and maximum or minimum disparity of each scene as object distance from the camera can be different for difference scenes, and some may be very close to the camera so to have very big disparity to result in unhealthy 3D viewing while some could be very small so to see flat object like 2D content.
There is a demand and need to establish the right 3D capturing mechanism, the corresponding 3D content packaging format, and 3D viewing method to always bring healthy 3D content to users.